How does the Outrider work in Agricola?

Question

At the weekend I was playing Agricola and played the occupation Outrider. The rule for the outrider is "Whenever you use the most recent Round card with one of your people, you receive 1 additional grain".

In round three "Sow and/or Bake" was turned over, and so I wanted to pick that card and sow the grain I would receive from it immediately. I wasn't sure about the legality of this move and so I asked for general consensus on it. Everyone agreed that I couldn't play the move, and so I didn't, but I'm still interested to know whether our ruling was correct.

I'm looking for an answer which either cites a rule that we didn't find or an official clarification about this situation. Failing either of those, I would be interested if there is a similar situation that has a definitive answer that might suggest a ruling here. Cheers!

Answer 1

The Agricola Compendium is a superb resource for this kind of rules question. In this case, it has your answer:

You receive the grain before you've taken the action. For example, if you use a sowing action, you can immediately sow the grain from the Outrider.

It sounds like you're interested in the principle behind the answer. I'd love to explain it, but I can't. The Agricola rules are generally very good about consistency of terminology - if something says "an oven" it means any of the cards with "Oven" in the name and no others. If something says "receive wood on an action space" (Pieceworker), that's different to "take wood that is on an action space" (Mushroom Collector). But sadly, one area where they're not so consistent is precise details of timing like this.

I'd love to be able to say things like in Magic: the Gathering, something like "Some cards have the pattern "Whenever [player] [takes action], [effect]." In this case, the [effect] happens at the start of the [action]." But that doesn't seem consistent with the rules on cards like Compulsory Education, Merchant. And it's unclear whether if the Wood Distributor has put some wood on a Major Improvement space, and you take it with a Clay Worker to get an additional clay, do you get the clay in time? I don't think Agricola has specific timing rules to allow you to state the answer with complete confidence in cases like this.